the same. >> they say if you haven't made a mistake, you haven't made a difference. finally today, scientific proof that it is okay, maybe even necessary to stumble. >> another day, another blast at the obama administration. this one involves getting phone records of ap reporters. the department of justice won't say what they were for but they did confiscate outgoing phone calls from 20 different phone lines between april and may of last year. this has five reporters and an editor were an exclusive tip that the cia foiled an active terror thought in yemen tow coincide the death of osama bin laden. among the big issues here is the depth of the search. it was wide reaching and included home phones, cell phones, the general switchboard

and an office wide fax line used by 100 a.p. reporters. and instead of telling the a.p. and giving them a chance to challenge it, the a.p. wasn't told until friday. a year after the fact. this can be seen as violating the first amendment freedom of the press and the fourth amendment, protecting against unreasonable searches. the a.p. calls it a massive and unprecedented intrusion. add go, there can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone, communications, of the a.p. and its reporters. these records reveal communications with confidential sources across all the news gathering activities. provide a road map to the operations and disclose information about a.p.'s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know. the man in the hot seat is attorney general eric holder. this is what he had to say just over an hour ago. >> this was a very serious leak.

it put the american people at risk. and trying to determine who was responsible for that i think required very aggressive action. we've investigated cases on the basis of the facts. not as a result of a policy to get the press or to do anything of that nature. i had been interviewed by the fbi in question, this matter. and to avoid a potential, the appearance of a potential conflict of interest and to make sure that the investigation was seen as independent. i recused myself from this matter. the deputy attorney general would have been the one who ultimately had to authorize the subpoena. >> we start with justice correspondent pete williams. what legal footing does the d.o.j. have here? >> i don't think that's much in question. the federal courts have that in the past the government has the legal authority to get the phone records of news organizations when it is doing these kinds of investigations. that's been upheld. as you noted, what is really controversial is not the fact

that it happened but the breadth of the time period covered and the number phone lines covered of that went by a little fast. the attorney general said in his news conference this afternoon that he personally had nothing to do with this decision. that he had taken himself out of the investigation or to use the legal material, had recused himself because he had been investigated. and he thought it was best to have this supervised under the deputy attorney general. so it is the deputy attorney general james cole who signed off on these. secondly we learn a little more in a letter that cole sent to the a.p. in response to its protest letter of yesterday. he said, we did this basically, a justice department did this after exhausting all other alternatives. he said in his letter that investigators questioned, or did over 550 interviews and reviewed tens of thousands of documents before going ahead and getting the phone records of the a.p.

reporters. he said they were limited in scope. they said they did cover several phone numbers but they were all number that the justice department thought were associated with the people who worked on the story. it was the subject of the government's concern. and he said while two months is the period during this this was done, it was only what he called a portion of that two-month period though he doesn't say how big that portion was. >> just to clarify, is the d.o.j. clarified and affirmed the reason it was going after these specific reporters and editors at the a.p. was in connection with that cia story? >> no. they've not said it but i think that's a pretty open secret at this point. >> okay. thanks as always. >> witness now, the white house correspondent at "time" magazine and form he chief d.o.j. spokesman matt mill here served as a top aide to attorney general eric holder. let me start with you.

ben smith has a column about this today. in a typical buzz feed manner, it includes a gift. >> cats. >> not taco cat but a gift of president obama morphing into president nixon. he talks about the fact that of course, republicans and republican administrations have behaved with similar overreach. and writes if the old republican party has little credibility on the questions of civil liberties and individual autonomy, a new one which joined at first hesitantly in senator rand paul is perfectly positioned to make its new challenge to the white house and the president. so what do you make of the politics of this? is this a turning point for the administration? >> i don't know if any one of these individual scandals that are now roiling in washington are turning points. the combination may be. the a.p. case and miller can

address this. it seem to be one of discretion. not of legality. and pete just said that. so really, it continues a trend we've been seeing over multiple administrations over multiple years. the justice department is far more aggressive than it used to be, going after reporters' sources. it is not something that seems there is any evidence that includes the white house or political motivation. the other scandals could raise to that level but haven't quite yet. there is not yet the evidence that puts it in the same, you know, nixonian frame. though you do have the horrible implication here that the irs was going after certain groups with political affiliations, and we have in america a pretty sordid history of a number of presidents from both parties using it in horrendous ways. >> i think he makes a good point. it was called nixonian because a loe of the bad habits started at the top with nixon.

there is no evidence that any of this has to do with president obama. yet some of it is still very concerning. you know the drill. if you want to typically get into a reporter's telephone records or files, you need to fill out one of these, a subpoena for each report he. we also have guidelines. 28, part 50, that have been referred to today both by the attorney general and his press conference and the deputy attorney general in his letter that pete williams was talking about. the problem is it doesn't look like those guidelines were followed in a meaningful way. i understand that 550 interviews were conducted, it sounds like, a lot. how could we be sure that every single reporter targeted at this point could not have been consulted in advance without sacrificing the integrity of the entire investigation. that is a high bar that they are claiming they've met with regard to every reporter. >> one of the problems d.o.j. always has, they have trouble explaining themselves in the middle of an investigation. there are some thing they have

to keep secret. if you look at the letter, i think it does make clear that they met the legal standard here. it is narrowly tailored. it is only the reporters who were the ones that broke the story. it sounds like it is a smaller length of time than the original two months the a.p. said. and they were going after what was a severe leak of information. and i think it is an important point that gets lost here. the justice department isn't targeting the associated press. the target of this investigation are the government officials that broke their oath to keep classified information secret. and of course, no one likes to have their information subpoenaed. certainly not reporters. but the justice department in this case had done a lot of work already and they apparently hadn't gotten anywhere in what the attorney general said was one of the worst leaks he's ever seen. so they felt it necessary to take this step. >> matt, going back to the politics surrounding this leak, the one that is alleged to have led to the a.p. investigation.

when the leak originally came out. republicans were very upset. they felt that leaks were intentionally going out to make the president look good. to look like he was tough on terror. in fact, 29 republicans' senators at that time signed on to a resolution asking holder to appoint outside special counsel to investigate the leaks. there was a lot said at that point. a lot of political pressure put on the d.o.j. to go aggressively after these leakers. do you think that that political pressure would have influenced the way that the d.o.j. conducted this investigation? >> no. i don't think so. if you saw, if you listen to people inside the administration, this really was a severe damaging leak. that said, i think what the republicans have done, you know, you saw them last year calling for these investigations. all of a sudden now, they're criticizing the fact the d.o.j. has gone and issued these subpoenas. it is like going into a restaurant, ordering an omelette and getting mad that the chef

broke some eggs. i don't know what they thought was going to happen if the investigation goes forward. this is how you conduct leak investigations. >> not quite with this much depth. >> jay carney and eric hold her back to back press conferences today. carney recognized both sides are valuable in this. let's listen to a little bit of jay. >> the president feels strongly that we need the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism. he is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests. so there are, there is a careful balance here that must be attained. >> we're about national security interests. eric holder said this is one of the top two or three most serious leaks he has ever seen. and it put american people at risk. the story that we're talking about, and pete williams said, this is an open secret. the story emerges from an agent

posing as a suicide bomber in yemen. he got an ied, a nonmetallic underwear bomb breaking up an al qaeda plot. he foiled that. he got out of the country. he tried to get back in and at that point the information was leaked to the associated press who held it for a few days. once they published it, his life was in danger and his family's life was in danger. so what the justice department is trying to do, it seem they're trying to do, figure out who was the leaker. and i believe as matt said, they're not targeting the a.p. they're targeting the leaker. is this really about intimidating the associated press or an aggressive attempt to find who the leaker is? >> i think there are a few things we know very clearly. one is that since valerie plame in the bush years, the justice department has become far more aggressive in going after the national security leaks. the obama administration has been far more gref than any in history. and even whatever the president thinks personally about

investigative reporters, that is just a fact. so reporters know that going in. i think it is fair to say, and i share the concern about the breadth of this scene that. a it is fair to say that people in this town who do reporting around classified information, know that you don't do it on e-mail and you don't do it on phones that are registered in your name. that has been true for a long time, too. so i don't think this is something that shuts down further reporting on national security. that said, i do think there is a real concern about the breadth. you can continue to see an expansion of this sort of investigative power. something that by popular consensus after watergate, the american public, the press, and various administrations agreed was not ideal for our system of government. we wanted a free exchange of information. >> i'll have my thoughts on this at the end of the show. thanks for joining us. up next, our take on

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[ male announcer ] universal studios summer of survival. ♪ hollywood star angelina jolie reveals in an editorial for the new york time that she had a preventive double mastectomy in february to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer. she writes, once i knew this was my reality, i decided to be proactive and to minute mize the risk as much as i could. she underwent a $3,000 genetic

testing for a mutation in the gene which sharply increased her chance of developing cancer. the doctors estimated she had an 87% chance of getting breast cancer and a 50% risk of ovarian. now that has been reduced to less than 5%. the 37-year-old oscar winner lost her mother to ovarian cancer in 2007. so she felt this risk acutely. jolie said she shared her experience to let women know that they have options. and she says, quote, i do not feel any less of a woman of i feel empowered that i made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity. she said now she can look at her children and say mommy will be here for as long as humans possible which is an amazing thing to be able to say. sometime the kids say, when are you going to die? when i am a going on die? >> how old will i be when you die? >> you want to say long, long in the future when that happens. a really powerful gesture from angelina jolie. so much that actors do in the public sphere in the real world

around political, politicized issues is total enough. and you want to say please shut up and go back to the town. we really don't care what you have to say. this is so important. and i think it will be liberating for a lot of women to see. this major sex symbol went through this and still feels feminine and womanly and sexy. and there is an increasing number of women having these preventive double mastectomies. there are a larger number of women who need or want that help. >> absolutely. and i liked what you were saying earlier just with us, that because she is such a sex symbol, and a symbol of femininity, it almost has even more of an impact. i think you're right on there. i remember when julian a rancic did this about a year ago. i'm not really plugged into the whole hollywood scene but i remember seeing her do some interviews on the "today" show and around. and it was really moving to hear

her talk about this. so she gets some credit, too. but in researching for this story, i came across a "washington post" piece by sarah cliff today that says most women probably shouldn't get the cancer screening angelina jolie did. it was interesting because while it commends her for this and says it was a good thing to do in her case, the united states preventive services task force recommends against this widespread test. and says that it can either be of no benefit for most people or in some cases, even harmful. and they say that the best reason to go do this is to get this test is if you have a serious family history of breast cancer. so that's interesting. i also just like that it got me to read something about breast cancer. you know, if you're not thinking about yourself having it right now, you kind of can tune it out. and i like that this story, at the very least, will get young

women to maybe read up on when they should be taking tests or looking into this stuff. >> i think it is a great thing. to your point, even mammograms and when women should start having mammograms regularly, peeve has become more controversial and more of a point of debate. how much good they're actually doing, particularly for young women where the risk is relatively low and there's a chance of a false positive and unnecessary procedures. something that i found astonishing about this in her op ed, angelina jolie talks about how expensive the test that she had to discover that she had this gene. over $3,000. and it turns out the reason that that test is so expensive as to compared to other genetic testing is because there is a drug company that has a patent on those two genes. so they are the only drug company that is allowed to do this test. so they have a monopoly on it.

and interestingly, last month actually, the aclu argued in front of the supreme court saying this is unconstitutional. there should be a decision this summer. but 20% of our genes are patented. >> that is bizarre. >> that's crazy. >> and he is saying the only genes that should be patented are levis. >> it is like his mantra. >> can we get a close-up of toure real quick? >> awkward. >> i think it is a great story. i wanted to lighten the mood for a quick second. the thing about it is there are so many stigmas attached to our medical care. if we don't brink them and often that's through community and stars and the media, and thing people care about. it is very difficult. it is obviously the case when you look at prostate exams for men. also meant health. a huge issue. 26% of americans have a

diagnosable mental, you know, health issue a year. and many of them go untreated because people feel like, and this is not what the science says, people feel like somehow a problem with my brain is different than a problem with my arm and they don't know how to talk about it or how to get help for it. so i think angelina jolie, a very famous person that a lot of people pay attention to it. she didn't have to come out this way. she did it in a smart, intelligent, detailed way. moy hope is with so many other medical decisions, if that helps people go on a case by case base i, talk to their doctor, consider nothing out of bounds as s.e. was pointing out. the model is not for everyone. but nothing is out of bounds. >> if your loved one was faced with the same medical odds angelina was, would you make the same decision? will colvin said i'm going through my first day of chemo and radiation. i am so proud of miss jolie for her brave, heroic decision that

will help millions with their decision. will, you are just as brave. like us and share your story. and will, keep fighting and we'll think about you. coming up, we're on the verge of major supreme court decisions on affirmative action. one of the most respected and well sourced court watchers on the inner workings of the roberts court. [ male announcer ] it's simple physics... a body at rest tends to stay at rest... while a body in motion tends to stay in motion. staying active can actually ease arthritis symptoms. but if you have arthritis, staying active can be difficult. prescription celebrex can help relieve arthritis pain

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there is only one position in government with permanent power and no supervision. the supreme court justices. when the court decides to jump into debates over our rights or how we spend our money or even define how we conduct our marriages, it usually has the last word. since president obama nominated

john roberts, the supreme court has weighed into just about every issue facing americans. obamacare, gun rights, terrorism, abortion, immigration, campaign spending, voting rights, re, gender discrimination, capital punishment, school integration, global warming, animal cruelty, video game regulation and miranda warnings. >> that felt like master piece theater. >> our next guest wrote about four of the most important controversies before the court in her new book, the roberts court. the struggle for the constitution. in the guest spot today, an award winning journalist for the national journal, how are you? >> i'm just fine. thank you for having me. >> excited to talk about your book. i want to start with something that justice roberts said that you wrote, really produced gamss in the courtroom when he said it. he asked a question that likened school integration programs in the modern era to racist segregation program in the south. let's take listen. >> everyone got a seat in brown

as well. but because they were assigned to those seats on the base i of race, it violates equal protection. how is your argument that everybody gets a seat distinguishable. >> unpack that for us. >> these were the arguments in the seattle and louisville public school cases in which both school districts were using race as a factor in assigning students. in seattle, they used it as one of several factors in assigning students to oversubscribe to high schools. and the chief justice here really, he get that the school districts were singling out and separating children in almost the same way that was happening in the south during segregation. the chief justice, i think, really has when it come to issues of race, this is one of the areas where he has a very

firm view and he joins as we saw in the decisions that came in those cases, with justices clarence thomas, in believing racial classifications for the most part are always wrong. even if they're done for a good reason. >> and they're wrong no matter what. >> yes. and i think it will be very interesting to see how this plays out. this term, the court has two cases. one involving affirmative action, the university of texas. and also, the voting rights case. >> i wanted to talk to you about exactly that. the voting rights act. the section five case will be coming back next month. jurisdictions with the history of discrimination need to get preclearance until if they want to change their election laws but maybe not after next month. roberts has spoken on this many

times throughout his career in 2009. he said congress can impose this disparity treatment forever because of the history in the south. some people say, yes, recent discriminations exist. it is not historic. what do you think that the roberts court will do about this voting rights act decision? >> i think it will be very close. when the court took up section five in 2009, roberts really sent a warning shot across the bow of congress telling them, when you reauthorize this law back in 2006, you were using very old data. and he said a lot has changed. and a lot has changed in the south. and justice kennedy picked up on this, too, saying you know, what about discrimination in the north? did congress take a look at that? or discrimination in the west? i have a feeling that section five is in a lot of trouble. especially after the oral arguments in the shelby county, alabama case. it will be very close.

i would be very worried if i were the civil rights community. >> going back to the conversation, you talk about the political context where americans are becoming more and more cynical of this court because they feel it is becoming overly politicized and we heard from the bench, from justice, in particular, the rights complaining about the bill. being 2,700 pages long of even referencing the cornhusker kickback which had been removed from the bill before final passage. so how much do you think the politics around health care and around obama care impact the ultimate decision. >> i think the justices are very aware of what was going on. after the health care decision, i spoke with one who said he really didn't know why but he really felt the outside political pressure more than he

had in other cases. not that it affected his decision but it was really hyped. that's really the hardest question to ask, when is the court doing politics. when is the court doing law. >> what i try to say to people in the book. each justice is the sum total of his or her life experiences in life and the law. and they bring those experiences to bear on the cases before them. the results are what the resultsful are i think we would be naive to believe they don't have certain ideological inclintonations. what also makes this time very interesting to watch this, i point out, for the first time in decades, we have five justices pointed by republican presidents and four by democratic presidents. >> and i want to get you to compare this court and its

politics with other courts. how does this court stack up against courts before it. >> i think if you look at the warren court in particular, they had some very controversial issues. i think what is unique with the roberts court, it has step into so many controversies in such a short period of time. this is a young court. it will only be about eight years old in september. when i started my book, it had only been five years old and already it had changed the law in terms of campaign finance, it settled the second amendment right on whether the guarantee was an individual right or tied to a militia. that's the gun case.

that's one of the reasons i took on the book. i used four cases to draw the reader through the seven years of the roberts court. so i would say it is a very bold court. a very confident court. a conservative majority on the court that sometimes it doesn't act in very conservative ways. >> it is interesting. your point about how young the court is is reminiscent of justice breyer's case. that never had so few changed so quickly. you talked about that in the book. thanks for joining us today. >> we're going to talk about a threat to our military service members that can be more deadly than combat. i want to make things more secure.

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call us. we can show you how at&t solutions can help you do what you do... even better. ♪ the wright brothers became the first in flight. [ goodall ] i think the most amazing thing is how like us these chimpanzees are. [ laughing ] [ woman ] can you hear me? and you hear your voice? oh, it's exciting! [ man ] touchdown confirmed. we're safe on mars. [ cheers and applause ] ♪ hi. [ baby fussing ] ♪ last year, 176 u.s. soldiers were killed in action while serving operation enduring freedom in afghanistan. it is a tragic reality of war

and a testament to the commitment made by our men and women in the military. but last year, double that number. 349 active duty service members committed suicide. a stark reminder of the toll that commitment makes on those protecting us. >> i don't remember much from the explosions. we had just finished the patrol and the ied struck our vehicle. i don't recall losing consciousness. when i did come back we were in the middle of an ambush that resulted in my being injured as well as another individual in the vehicle being injured. >> the armed forces foundation, they let just regular everyday people see how hard it is after a combat tour to interact with the world again as a real person. >> to help with the hidden scars of war, the armed forces foundation has launched the help save our troops campaign. with more than 600,000 vets

suffering from ptsd and hundreds of thousands more dealing with traumatic brain injuries. i've had the honor of boringing with similar programs including alaska's healing hearts to help our returning troops get the attention they deserve. it is my pleasure to welcome the president ask executive director of the armed forces foundation. i've talked to a lot of these folks. what strikes me is that in addition to the ptsd, the thing they saw, what strikes me is that a lot of these guys return home and the thing that gets in their way there overwhelming feeling of uselessness. overseas, in combat, they had a mission. they had a duty. and it wasn't just clean the dishes. it was serve and protect their country. this is a big deal. and i'm sure very rewarding. and self-affirming. then they come home and it is sort of returning to the banality of day to day life.

it is just not the sahat and not just the ptsd sort of emotional and psychological issues that they bring home with them? >> well, it is really hard when you have a pretty simple life and a pretty simple mission like you talked about overseas. your dishes are done for you. your meal are being cooked for you. you have a very simple mission every day. then you come back to normal life. there's traffic. there's kids. there's everything that you have to do to take them to karate, to ballet, to school, to all the stuff, the pressure that go on, especially for our national guard and reservists. they go from being athere and then they go back to being an accountant or whatever and they're not the same. and it is really difficult for them to have such a quick transition. in world war ii, our guys had a lot of time when they would take their boats across the sea to talk to each other before they were coming back to normal life. it would be a month or two

before they returned to their normal lives they had before the war. now you could be back in as quick as 24 hours before you come back to your civilian life and you're expected to just jump right back in. your wife wants you to come back in. she wants to you help out and be engaged. >> 69% of the veterans who kill themselves are over 50 years old. do you think it is harder to see the signs of depression in people who are trained to be tough, especially when they've succeeded at being in the military for so long? >> yeah. there is such a stigma attached with pts and everything, traumatic brain injury, so it is harder for the older generation. especially those guys who serve in the vietnam or world war ii and they saw how tough they were and the issues they had to deal with and nobody wanted to admit there were issues so let's just move on and be tough. this generation has gotten wise and they've been told, your career will not be at risk.

your career will be fine. nobody will punish you for coming forward and getting help that you need. let's fix your life and your family's life. >> and patricia, one of the disturbing things we're seeing an increase in the number of suicides among veterans. what in your view is driving that trend and what can we do to help? >> you know, that's one of the most disturbing things to me. last year when i gave speeches, i would say one veteran every 90 minutes was committing suicide. now i say one veteran every 65 minutes is committing suicide. a lot of that has to do with the multiple deployments but coming back to a bad economy where there aren't a lot of jobs. it adds to the uselessness. there aren't a lot of qualified people to help. you don't have a lot of train psychologists and psychiatrists who have military service. so it is not as spicing for these guys to want to talk to people. the v.a. is jammed up. one of our biggest problems is that a lot of these guys are addicted to pain pills. they have pain pills and they're

drinking and depression. it is all a deadly spiral. everybody can do something to help out. we all know people who served. you have neighbors, loved ones who served. go knock on their doors and invite them to be a part of life. to be a part of what thing they used to enjoy in the past. and that's really all it takes. we used to have those wonderful psa's from the government talking about signs and symptoms of depression. it is time to bring that back. that's why we brought out our hem save our troops campaign to help people understand, everyone can do something of even fits to knock on the door and say, hey, come join our barbecue. i know you're having a tough time, let's go for a walk. >> thanks so much for all you do. i look forward to hooking up with you at troops on the track nascar event in the future. hungry for the best? it's eb. want to give your family the very best in taste, freshness, and nutrition? it's eb. want to give them more vitamins, omega 3s,

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supporting some of the biggest ideas in modern history. so why should our history matter to you? because for more than two centuries, we've been helping ideas move from ambition to achievement. ♪ and the next great idea could be yours. ♪ our next guest says mistakes are an essential part of his field. not toure. he is a renowned physicist and says the errors from the most famous scientists from einstein to darwin to kelvin are every bit as important to the world as their successes. according to him, the march toward our understanding of evolution and the earth around us has been filled with false starts and botched theories and we are all better for it. joining us now is mario, the

astrophysicist at the hubble space science institute and the author of brilliant blunders. let's start there. why blunders? why are they productive? what was the goal of the book? >> so there were three goals to the book. one is to make us all feel a little bit better. namely that even the biggest geniuses make some serious blunders. second is to correct the misconception that some people think that science marches on a straight line from a to b when in fact it is really a zig zag path that encounters many, many blunders. and third to convey this notion that if you want to think outside the box, be prepared to meet some blunders along the way. >> chars darwin didn't know any genetics and we cannot blame him

for that because nobody knew genetics at the time. but the theory of genetics with which he was operating was like mixing of paints. you take qualities of the father and the mother and mix them. or you would do gin andtonic. what he didn't realize was that if that was the correct theory, natural selection could never have worked. because you know, you think of one black cat, 100 white cats. every time they mate, you mix those paints, no way even if black gives some advantage will take over. because you know, it will just get diluted and diluted. >> i want to talk about the big bang for a hot second. you look at the review of when we had the big bang on one side and the steady state theory on the other. you tell the story of fred hoyle. a big believer in the steady state theory. that the universe doesn't change over time. it basically has no beginning or end. kind of a cool concept.

that ultimately the big bang won out. that's the idea that the universe began as hot dense matter and then it expanded and cooled over time. you explain that fred basically knew a lot of stuff and better, but he couldn't get away from the study staeady state theory. you wrote being wrong in a major enterprise constitutes a trauma. why was hoyle traumatized by the fact the steady state theory was failing? >> you know, fred hoyle had this idea of a steady state, that the universe isn't changing. this was a very elegant idea, and he got, you know, in some way fell in love with that idea. and so that every time, you know, people said no, actually it started with a big bang and so on, you know, he's -- what's amazing is that he coined the term "big bang." you know, he said it all started in one big bang, and this is the term we use ever since. but he never believed in that.

and the main blunder really, in his case, is that just stubbornly refusing to accept even as evidence was mounting that the big bang was the correct theory. >> are you saying that he used the term "big boang" dericively? >> this was in a radio address. he wanted to create a mental picture for his listeners. basically he said on one hand we have this theory, and on the other, there are those who say it all started in one big bang. >> mario, you'll be happy to know in all of my science classes i almost always made blunders and that's why i'm here today and not in a lab somewhere. but, you know, legend has it that thomas edison famously said, no, no, no, i didn't fail a thousand times to make a light bulb work, i came up with a thousand ways how not to make a light bulb. but are there any happy accidents that come out of these blunders where maybe you don't stumble through science to get to the point you were hoping,

but you do sort of go off route and find something else? some other wonderful discovery? >> well, yes. there are a number of such examples and discovery of penicillin is one such example. but, in fact, you will notice that i called the book "brilliant blunders" because of the reason that, in fact, all of the blunders i describe here eventually actually led to breakthroughs. i mean, the idea is that to make a really big discovery, you need to think outside the box. and to think outside the box really means that sometimes you're going to make blunders. >> right. >> and this is the way science really progresses. >> all right. mario livio, interesting things and certainly makes us all who have made a blue blunders feel better that geniuses have also made blunders. so thank you so much for the book and for joining us. >> thank you for having me. all right.

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press, now asking some tough questions. between white house spokesman jay carney's struggle to answer pool questions last friday about a flood of benghazi e-mails revealing the state department's desire to scrub terrorism links from talking points. and news on friday that the irs has been unfairly targeting conservative non-profits for their tax exempt applications. the latest revelation that the department of justice secretly obtained two months of phone records of "ap" reporters and editors in an apparent witch hunt to root out the cause of a rare unwanted leak couldn't have come at a worse time for an administration that has insisted on a host of scandals nothing to see here. this isn't just big government, but government with a vengeance. one that will dispatch its tax collectors if it doesn't like your politics. or unleash the fbi if it doesn't like your reporting. or prosecute you for whistle blowing. this is a government with a long enemies list, not to mention a total disregard for the sanctity of the first amendment.

i won't be surprised if this latest revelation ends with eric holder's resignation, and it will be deserved. just imagine the reaction to this, say, if michael mukasey, one of george w. bush's attorney generals, presided over this? or janet reno of the clinton administration had had this on her watch? white house, the liberal media, and democratic elected officials have swatted away these assertion assertions as nothing more than right wing conspiracy political propaganda, black helicopter paranoia and most routineny, unadulterated hatred for president obama. now, all of that may, in fact, animate many of the inquiries, but that doesn't vitiate their validity nor does it make the accusations untrue or undeserving of media scrutiny. the lengths to which the administration has gone to silence whistleblowers and their sources is nothing short of astonishing. simply put, this is not the american way. for those of us looking to draw attention to these issues, it's been infuriate to see many of

the press often the victims of this very government overreach ignore and dismiss them even as their sources were being prosecuted under the espionage act more times than all previous administrations combined. hopefully, though, now that these stories have become impossible to ignore, the press will finally wake up and smell the chilling effect that puts their very livelihoods in danger. ask me any questions and i'll tell you no lies. the government has lied to us is hardly unique to this administration, but few brave souls have had the courage to ask tough questions. and many who have have found themselves on the receiving end of government intimidation. now, press and citizen alike, we should all be asking, what kind of country do we want to live in? okay. that does it for "the cycle." martin, it's all yours. good afternoon, it's tuesday may the 14th. and mama told me there'd be days like this. ♪ >> safe to say it's been a rough week so far for president obama. >> the justice department

secretlyt's e of the most egregious abuses of government power. >> none of us have ever seen anything like this. >> is this a police state or what? >> this should send a chill up your spine. >> chilling. >> chilling. >> it's chilling. which also describes the champagne i've been waiting to break out for just this scandal. >> this sounds like a president somewhat drunk on power. >> if irs personnel were intentionally targeting conservative groups, they have to be held fully accountable. >> this was a targeting of the president's political enemies. >> the president starts to lose control of the agenda? can't govern. >> everything i've ever said about obama is true. >> i'm going to do everything i can over the next 3 1/2 years. >> he's a secret muslim shape shifting alien from kenya who is coming for our guns. >> continue to reach out to my republican friends on the other side of the aisle, because i sure want to do some governing.